Spanish Guitar Exercises

This is an excerpt from a piece called Mano a Mano which has a Gipsy Kings feel. This opening section features arpeggio style chords in C sharp minor. I’m utilizing the open E and B strings to get a nice Spanish dissonance and I have also added some chords in the higher positions. To learn […]

This piece, written by Paco De Lucia, was written in 1973 and is featured on is album Fuente y caudal. As told by his sister on the documentary Light and Shade Paco improvised this piece as a filler for the album. Ironically it was a runaway hit and helped Paco break in to the […]

Rumba Strumming is a very useful tool for performing flamenco music. This video will take you through the Rumba technique as used by Paco De Lucia and Gipsy Kings (and many others). The chord progression we are using is Am – G -F – E . We start with a thumb down and […]

Alzapua is a flamenco technique involving the thumb. the term comes from the word alzar which means to raise. It is usually payed as a fast flourish of notes in quick sequence. The thumb plays all notes using down and up strokes. Played accurately and fast it can sound fantastic as a high point of a falseta or […]

Rodrigo’s Concerto De Aranjuez is an very well known spanish guitar work, though it’s the Adagio theme which people are most familiar with. Today we are going to be looking at the into to the first movement. The concerto starts with a series of rasguedo chords which are played in a 6/8 and 3/4 time […]

The Phrygian mode is one of the main flamenco modes. It basically consists of the notes of the A minor scale starting on E. To add tension I also play G# on the 3rd string. This is very common in Spanish guitar. What are modes? A scale will generally consist of seven notes. There […]